Too soon?

I just thought of an awesome comeback to something a classmate said to me in 1982.

Interesting interview about student stress over the years

Like a lot of Gen X college instructors, I'm often at a loss for how to deal with the effects of student stress, anxiety, and general mental health issues on their work in my classes. One question I often wonder about is why there seems to be so much more of it than there used to be. Or alternatively, is there much more of it than there used to be, or is it just that we have more language for talking about it and less stigma around talking about it? 

This interview that associate professor of psychiatry Jessi Gold had with developmental psychologist Alexis Redding brought up some interesting points from her research on the emotional experiences of college students from the 1970s, based on "lost" transcripts and recordings of interviews that had been done with those students fifty years ago. Dr. Redding and her colleague Dr. Nancy Hill wrote a book based on those old transcripts, entitled The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood. It looks like it would be a great read for me, both as a college instructor and an archives spelunker. 

She did a TEDx talk about this too, which I'm embedding below.

This part of the interview stood out to me: Dr. Redding talks about the "W-Curve," which I hadn't heard of before:

One strategy I encourage is understanding and talking publicly about the W-Curve, which describes the predictable ups and downs of the college transition. Early on, students face a setback as they acclimate and try to build meaningful connection from scratch. Eventually they make friends and settle into their classes, but when they visit home during fall break, they often hit another setback, perhaps because home doesn’t feel the same as it used to. When campuses talk about the W-Curve and how normal it is, it sets the tone: students realize they’re not the only one struggling.

She also notes that "the W-Curve does one more thing: It helps us spot the student whose struggle is atypical, with dips that are more prolonged or extreme than we’d expect, which is exactly the student who may need clinical support."

She also encourages faculty to share their stories with students, both their successes and failures. Perhaps I should try that more.

Here's the TEDx talk:

Four human advantages

Came across this article about using AI in teaching by Lew Ludwig, a math professor. This paragraph stuck with me--I'm just going to quote it because I don't have time to discuss it:

Ethan Mollick put a name to this a few weeks ago in his post “The Overhang.” He argues that as AI gets better at producing things, what matters is what we bring to it, and he names four human advantages: deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency. Deep knowledge is the expertise that lets a golf pro see the flaw in a swing at a glance. Wide knowledge is knowing enough about other fields to ask for what you want. Agency is the willingness to explore what the tool can do before someone tells you. And taste is the ability to look at what the AI hands you and know which parts to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something it would never have made on its own. Mollick's point is that taste used to be a luxury. Making things was slow and expensive, so the constraint was always producing enough stuff. Now making is fast and cheap. The scarce resource is knowing what to keep. 

Week three of classes--already knocked down by a cold

At least I hope it's just a cold. I've been coughing a lot the last day or two, so I don't know if it's getting worse or turning the corner. Just started taking Robitussin, though that hasn't helped much yet. I had to teach via Zoom today and might need to again tomorrow. I'm not a big fan of running a large class through Zoom, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The students seem interested and involved, though, which is good. 

I'm enjoying the rhetoric class so far, though sometimes our conversation takes odd turns. Today we were talking about Lloyd Bitzer's foundational article, "The Rhetorical Situation," and a student's question ended up leading me to reflect on the "intentional fallacy" and the New Critical approach to literary criticism that I was (at least partly) educated in. I have since tended to take a more rhetorical approach to reading literature, though. (I remember when I was presenting about Vern Sneider and A Pail of Oysters on a panel about East Asia in Anglophone fiction--I looked over at the copy of my paper that one of my co-panelists had printed out and saw that she had written in the margin, "Intentional fallacy?" Was that her response to my whole paper?)

These disconnected recollections are brought to you by my cough syrup. More later...

Social media quandaries

In the week or so leading up to the beginning of the fall semester, I've cut back a lot on my use of LinkedIn, which is my only remaining active social media account after I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts (the latter a couple of times!) and stopped using my Bluesky account. (I'm not counting YouTube, LINE, or this account.) I deleted the LI app from my phone and logged out of LI on my computers (though admittedly, I've "checked" it once or twice since initially doing that).

This morning when I got up, I thought about whether I should just delete the LinkedIn entirely. As with all of the social media accounts I've had, I find that I have learned a lot from LI about events going on that I'm interested in, people's publications and presentations that are often relevant to my interests, information that is useful that I probably wouldn't think of searching for, etc. So when I think of deleting it, the FOMO is real. 

On the other hand, I've (mostly) gotten along OK without Facebook and Twitter and the other platforms since I left them, Admittedly, I do end up on the "public" side of FB once in a while when I'm searching for something, and when I was in Taiwan this past summer, I was talking to someone about my Ts'ai T'iech-ch'eng research and he recommended contacting a number of sources who only seem to be available through FB. (This leads to my second quandary that I've had since that conversation: should I or shouldn't I rejoin Facebook--just to contact these people or organizations? Knowing me, it seems like a slippery slope.) 

I guess for now I'll keep the LI account but just not visit it--too busy, anyway. It might end up going the way of my Bluesky account, which I think is still there if I could remember how to log into it. Or I might eventually pull the plug on it entirely, and join the un-social-mediated (or whatever you'd call it). I see the results are mixed, but from this sample, most people are positive about the change. If anyone reading this has tried disconnecting, let me know your thoughts!

Our Kerr biography has a (tentative) title!

Found out the other day that one of the titles in the running for the GHK biography has been approved by the sponsor of the book, the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs. The tentative title is  《葛超智傳記：亞洲、冷戰與一段未竟之志》 (roughly, George H. Kerr: Asia, the Cold War, and an Unfulfilled Ambition), and it should be coming out early next year. It's co-authored by Professors 蘇瑤崇 (Su Yao-tsung), 泉水英計 (Hidekazu Sensui), 吉原ゆかり (Yukari Yoshihara), and me. More details when I know more!

New school year's resolutions?

I was going to write up my resolutions for the new academic year as I've done in the past, but I noticed that last year I didn't really make any resolutions besides the idea (or fantasy) of getting more sleep. Maybe I should have specified that I should do that sleeping at night rather than taking long naps in the middle of the day.

I also came across this article from Jessi Gold, a wellness officer and professor of psychiatry. She suggests, among other things, that you should "consider words or values" instead of resolutions. This way you're not making specific but impossible-to-keep resolutions like "read a book a week" or something like that but rather suggesting "an intention."

So I'm going to go with a word or value for this year that I'd like to keep in mind. One of the things that I got from rereading my dissertation in preparation for the Shansi roundtable this past summer was the reminder about how enthusiastic the Shansi Reps were in the classroom. I think that with a few exceptions, it has been more difficult for me lately to maintain (or even start with) enthusiasm when I'm teaching. Whether it's just regular burnout or a combination of that, the current political and institutional climates, and the rise of GenAI, it's harder for me to look forward to the new academic year with a positive outlook. And if I'm not enthusiastic, how can I expect students to be enthusiastic? 

So I'm going to try to keep the word "enthusiasm" in mind this academic year. 

Four new books in the former native speaker's library

I got a collection of four small illustrated books about old Taichung, 《臺中舊城》, which includes 

• 「宮原武熊的一天」(about Miyahara Takekuma, a Japanese ophthalmologist who ran an eye clinic in Taichung),  
• 「和平日報：二七部隊」(about the Taichung-based newspaper I've been combing through for my research on 蔡鐵城),
• 「臺中公園-前世今生」(about Taichung Park), and 
• 「1960's 綠川點點滴滴的日子」(about the cleaning up of the Lü Chuan [Green River] in downtown Taichung).

These books also have maps of old Taichung that I guess you can use to find the places discussed. Wish I had time this trip to visit Taichung and take a look at those historical sites.

 

From their website, 臺中舊城生活博物館, it appears that they've published other books about Taichung, too.